Besides its outer form (“This is a poem in quatrains in falling rhythm rhyming aabb” — a description of Blake’s “Tyger”), every poem has internal structural form. This is its dynamic shape, which derives from the curve traced by the emotions of the poem as they change over its duration. That emotional curve is plotted by connecting two, three, or more points of the poem, a rise from depression to hope to joy, for instance — or a decline from triumph through doubt to despair. Very few poems represent an unchanging steady state of the same emotion all through.
Some poems are two-part (binary) poems, like William Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal” (which we saw changing from illusion to stern knowledge), or like Dickinson’s “The Heart asks Pleasure – first –” (which we saw changing its conception of God from benevolence to cruelty). Another fundamentally binary form is the debate poem, where A speaks, then B challenges A, then A replies to B, back and forth.
There are also many three-part (ternary) poems, which often take on the internal structure of beginning, modulation, end (a song-form preserved in lyric). For an example of three-part form, see W. B. Yeats’s “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.”
Internal forms are infinitely variable, since they represent emotional response, always volatile. One well-known internal structure is that of the “surprise” ending, where the last few lines reverse everything that has gone before. George Herbert’s poem “The Collar” is full of rebellion against God, until the very end:
But as I raved, and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Methoughts I heard one calling, Child!
And I replied, My Lord.
In investigating the internal structure of a poem, one should try to divide it into parts along its “fault lines.” Where does the logic of the argument seem to break? Where does the poem change from first person to second person? Where does the major change in tense or speech act take place? Here are some of the ingredients of internal structural form that will help you to explore a poem.
Poems are, on the whole, made of sentences, and sentences are an important internal structuring principle of poems. For instance, there will often be a procession of short sentences, and then one very long sentence, or vice versa. The poet means us to notice how many sentences there are in a poem, and how they relate to one another. There may be a generalizing sentence (“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”) followed by many particulars; or many small instances leading up to more important ones, as in Robert Herrick’s summary of his poetic subjects, ending at the hope of salvation:
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,
Of April, May, of June, and July flowers.
I sing of Maypoles, hock carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes.
I write of youth, of love, and have access
By these to sing of cleanly wantonness.
I sing of dews, of rains, and, piece by piece,
Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris.
I sing of times trans-shifting, and I write
How roses first came red and lilies white.
I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
The court of Mab° and of the fairy king.queen of the fairies
I write of hell; I sing (and ever shall)
Of heaven, and hope to have it after all.
You can often discover a lot about a poem by copying out its successive sentences in prose, putting each one under its predecessor. You can then ask yourself how they resemble one another, and how they differ, and why.
Sentences are written either in the first person (I/me in the singular, we/us in the plural); the second person (you — archaic forms are thou in the nominative singular, thee in the objective singular, and ye in the plural); or the third person (he/him, she/her, and it in the singular; they/them in the plural). A change of person as a poem goes along is a significant structuring device. A change to the second person, addressing a person (“you”) in the poem who hasn’t appeared before, usually raises the temperature of a poem, as when Wordsworth, after a long monologue in “Tintern Abbey,” turns to his sister, saying, “For thou art with me here upon the banks / Of this fair river,” and we learn for the first time that he is not alone. An elegy often begins by trying to keep the dead person “alive” by directly addressing him or her, and may then subside into the third person, speaking no longer of “you” but of “the body,” as Robert Lowell does in his elegy for his mother, “Sailing Home from Rapallo.” He is bringing his mother’s body from Italy (where she had died) home to New England, and we gradually see Charlotte Lowell turn from being a “you” to being “the corpse”:
Your nurse could only speak Italian,
but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week,
and tears ran down my cheeks. . . .
When I embarked from Italy with my mother’s body,
the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova°Gulf of Genoa
was breaking into fiery flower.
. . . . .
Mother traveled first-class in the hold.
. . . . .
In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin,
Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL.
The corpse
was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.
Person reveals the poet’s relation to the world. Is the poet in the world of “you” or “we” — other persons — or in a solitary world inhabited only by the “I” of the poem? Or a world with no addressees, full of “its” and “thems”?
Every sentence has a subject; the subject is the agent of the verb. Many poems have one subject (“I”) for every sentence: in them, agency never changes. Others have a single change in agency: see, for instance, Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” in which the subject of all the main verbs is “I” until the last line, when, because the ball turret gunner has been killed, the “I” vanishes and “they” take over. The “I” who acted becomes the “me” who is acted on. Here is the complete poem:
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Some poems have a different subject for every sentence — these make the reader take on several different perspectives at once. See, for instance, Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” where in the first stanza alone there are four different subjects that govern verbs:
Nautilus Island’s hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
she’s in her dotage.
Heiress, sheep, son, farmer: all govern verbs (“lives,” “graze,” “is,” “is”). These agents are all linked in an elaborate system of center and satellites. The hermit heiress has her cottage, her sheep, her son, and her farmer (unfortunately, there is also her dotage, which she is in). The heiress still in some sense owns her sheep, her son, and her farmer (they are all hers); but because they are all given independent existence as agents in the poem, we know they are no longer hers, really. They are separate from her, separate subjects; and the only things that are really hers now are her cottage and her dotage; only these two rhyming nouns, among “her” possessions, are not independent agents governing a verb. By tracing agency through a poem we can tell who is ruling it as it goes along. In “Skunk Hour,” the various inhabitants of the seaside town at first “own” the poem; then the disturbed speaker “owns” the poem while he carries out his voyeuristic acts; but finally it is the mother skunk with her column of kittens who “owns” the poem and the town, as in the last stanza the troubled speaker yields agency to the skunk:
I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air—
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
It is important to know who “owns,” by agency, each part of every poem.
Sentences are written in tenses, and tenses are also an important internal structuring aspect of the poem, making it move in time (as we saw in Adrienne Rich’s “Necessities of Life”) from past to present to future. Tense-changes ask to be noticed. Sometimes, even often, they are the main point of the poem. As we saw earlier, in Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal,” the first stanza is in the past tense, the second in the present tense. The first stanza stands for delusion (“seemed”); the second stanza for reality; and the white gap between the two tenses represents the death of the beloved. Here are the tensed verbs:
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears;
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
The main structuring agent of the poem is the tense-change, bracketing the invisible (infinite, untensed) white-space moment of the girl’s death.
“We thought in images,” said Robert Lowell in a poem to his friend and fellow poet John Berryman. Though words in poetry can only refer and not really picture, a linkage of references in the same category of sense-perceivable words — say, many words about the moon, such as “bright,” “beams,” “round,” “white,” and so on — tend to create the impression of the object to which they all refer. Linked words (referring especially to the senses of sight and hearing) help to structure many poems. These words can be all of one sort (a collection of names of different flowers, for instance, in Milton’s “Lycidas”) or they can be of different sorts; that is, a series of specific nouns like “flood,” “earthquake,” “fire,” and “shipwreck” can all help to construct the single abstract category “catastrophe.” There are systematic ways in which the concrete words that some refer to as “images” may be assembled, too: they may be arranged in parallel, or in contrast, or in a ranked hierarchy. See how Sylvia Plath arranges her images in “Metaphors”:
I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.
In this poem, Plath runs through many parallel images to express her feelings about being pregnant. The first is her ignorance of what her baby will be (boy? girl? placid? temperamental? tall? short?) at the end of nine months: it is a “riddle.” Next, she emphasizes (via the elephant) the weight she has gained and (via the house) the difficulty of movement. Next, she emphasizes (via the melon) her new shape and how fragile her legs feel (like tendrils) supporting her abdomen. From the melon, she generalizes to the newborn baby as a “red fruit” — then generalizes further to its precious potential as “ivory” and “fine timbers.” The dynamism of the progress of pregnancy is pointed to in the organic “yeasty rising” of bread; but then the dynamism (given its value) is made inorganic, as money is “new-minted” (but with a return to her weight in the referral to herself as a “fat” purse).
The next set of metaphors, however, departs from what we could reasonably call “images.” “I’m a means, a stage.” These abstractions — a means to an end, a stage in a process — show the poet generalizing beyond the dynamic images (bread rising, money being newly minted) to dynamism itself, a dynamism that reaches to a foreseen conclusion.
Immediately the poet returns to images. She is a pregnant cow (another reference to her unwieldy size) who has “eaten a bag of green apples” (thought to provoke labor in cows); and she is a helpless and fearful passenger, unable to leave the rushing forward motion of the train that will take her to her unknown destination.
You might ask yourself both why the poet passes from images to abstractions, and equally why she does not end in abstractions but returns to images for closure. Does it seem dehumanizing for the author to call herself a means? a stage? Each of Plath’s images has a part-to-whole relation to the theme of the poem. Taken all together, they give the poem its emotional resonance. Which parts are cheerful? Which are triumphant? Which are apprehensive? How would the poem be different if it ended with the elephant? the money? the cow? the stage? Why does Plath end, do you think, with the train?